The impact of information and communication technologies on education: identifying the effects on learning computer programming by the utilization of an ICT-based programming environment

Koutsakas, Philippos
(2008)
The impact of information and communication technologies on education: identifying the effects on learning computer programming by the utilization of an ICT-based programming environment.
(MPhil thesis), Kingston Polytechnic.

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Abstract

How does the interaction of learners with Information and Communication Technologies (hence IGTs) affect the teaching -learning equation in general and specifically the learning of computer programming? Are there any measurable changes in the learners' conceptions as a result of this interaction? This study is an attempt to identify the effects of ICTs utilization during the teaching process on students' conceptions about computer programming.
During two separate phases which lasted one and three (separate) weeks respectively, an ICTs' teacher followed the progress of 69 media education students from a Technical Vocational School in northern Greece. The students were organized to form four separate groups and were involved in a number of computer programming-related didactic activities. Two of them, the experimental groups, utilized an ICT-based learning environment for computer programming and the other two, the control groups, used the traditional Pascal programming environment.
Students' conceptions on a number of demanding computer programming issues were recorded and all students' answers were textually analyzed and interpreted according to SOLO taxonomy. Following this procedure students' answers were classified in one of the nine levels and sub-levels of the SOLO, according to their 'amount of required working memory', 'level of relating operation' and 'level of consistency and closure'. In order to determine the effects of this interaction, the outcomes of control and experimental classes were quantitatively evaluated and compared within the context of a quasi¬experimental research design.
The research identified that (1) students who were involved in didactic activities supported either by the ICT-based environment or by the typical programming environment demonstrated improvements in their achievements, (2) students (experienced programmers) who utilized the ICT- based programming environment for a short period of time demonstrated greater improvements in their understanding on the researched issues than the students (experienced programmers) who used the typical programming environment and (3) students (novice programmers) who utilized the ICT-based learning environment from their very first steps and for a longer period of time, demonstrated remarkably greater improvements than all the other students.
The first and third research outcomes, only if we assume that a set of pre-requisites are met, are statistically significant (according to Wilcoxon and Mann-Whitney tests) and can be generalizable to similar population subsets to those used during the present research.